Suicide Squad 2 Director Shares Scrapped Sequel Details (and What Went Wrong)

Comedy killed the Suicide Squad. Despite being massacred by critics, the David Ayer-directed Suicide Squad movie made nearly $750 million at the global box office in 2016, and Warner Bros. commissioned a sequel. But when the End of Watch and Fury filmmaker stepped aside from Suicide Squad 2 to develop the Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn-fronted Gotham City Sirens spinoff instead, the studio hired Gavin O’Connor (The Accountant and Jane Got a Gun) to write and direct the Suicide Squad sequel.

It never happened. By the time O’Connor turned in his script, the failure of 2017’s Justice League led to a regime change at DC Films: Walter Hamada was appointed president of DC Films, replacing Jon Berg, who had been running the DC Extended Universe alongside chief creative officer Geoff Johns.

RELATED: David Ayer Defends Push for Suicide Squad Director’s Cut: “I Hope My Real Film Can Be Shared One Day”

“It’s another example of the dysfunction of our industry,” O’Connor told Collider in an interview pegged to The Accountant 2. “I had a very specific take. They wanted to do it. I think I was probably three-quarters of the way into the script when they brought in a new regime and all the DC people I was working with were gone.”

“I was writing on the lot, I got a little bungalow there; my writing partner and I would just meet there and write every day. There was a knock on the door, and it was the new DC president,” O’Connor recalled of Hamada. “He said, ‘So where are you with the script?’ I said ‘It’s almost done,’ and he said ‘Can I read it?’ And I said, ‘Well, you can read it when it’s finished.’ A couple of weeks later, I gave it to him, and he said ‘Can you make it a comedy?’ And I said, ‘That’s not what I wrote, and that’s not the agreement I have with the studio.’”

In the end, O’Connor said, “He wanted me to make it into a comedy, and I was like, ‘All right, I guess I won’t be working here.’”

O’Connor described his Suicide Squad 2 script as a “father-daughter story with Deadshot and his daughter,” referring to Will Smith’s expert marksman and assassin Floyd Lawton, a member of Amanda Waller’s (Viola Davis) Task Force X motivated by getting his sentence commuted to spend more time with his daughter Zoe (Shailyn Pierre-Dixon).

Gavin O’Connor’s Unmade Suicide Squad 2 Plot

In 2018, writers David Bar Katz (Ray Donovan) and actor Todd Stashwick — who next appears in The Accountant 2 — were brought on to co-write Suicide Squad 2. But later that year, it was reported that O’Connor’s script was “almost identical” to Birds of Prey, the Suicide Squad spinoff teaming Robbie’s emancipated Harley Quinn with DC heroines like the Huntress and Black Canary.

“When that film was given the go ahead to go before Squad 2, O’Connor grew frustrated and fell off [the] project to do Has Been instead,” Variety‘s Justin Kroll reported at the time, referencing the Ben Affleck basketball-themed drama that became 2020’s The Way Back.

Other reports revealed that O’Connor’s Suicide Squad 2 would have dispatched Task Force X — Deadshot (Smith), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), Katana (Karen Fukuhara), and Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) — to the Middle East to rescue a meta-human (the explosive-powered Plastique) from a dictator.

Dwayne Johnson’s Black Adam was set to be the villain alongside Onslaught, the Qurac-based terrorist group (originally called the Jihad) from the classic John Ostrander-penned Suicide Squad comic run. James Gunn would ultimately cite the Ostrander comics as the biggest influence on 2021’s The Suicide Squad, the quasi-sequel/reboot Gunn wrote and directed as his first foray into the DC Universe.